My Pragmatic Take on Global Warming

Let me start off by saying I believe global warming to be true. I don’t care who sent what email about fudging the numbers in one report. I don’t care about statisticians fiddling with their data for dramatic effect during Al Gore’s power point presentations. I understand enough science to agree that greenhouse gases capture more of the sun’s energy. I also understand enough history to know humanity has had a profound impact on our planet.

Did you ever wonder why Iraq was once called the Fertile Crescent? Because ten thousand years ago it wasn’t a desert. Primitive agriculture ruined the top soil. That, and it was an area vulnerable to desertification.

Why does Lebanon revere cedar trees? Because it used to have forests of them like the redwoods of California. The Phoenician galleys made out of those timber sailed as far as Britain, and even circumnavigated Africa under Egyptian orders. Those forests are gone now. So are the forests of Northern Europe. So are the great White Pine and Red Pine forests of Canada. We’re doing it today with the rain forests.

Acid rain poisoned lakes all over the world. DDT pesticide got into the food chain, and it’s taken decades to get out. CFCs burned a hole in the ozone layer. The fallout from Chernobyl circled the Earth. We’ve swept the oceans clean of most fish. Tuna and cod are approaching a point of no return. When you see all those ways we have devastated the planet, how can anyone say that our cars and power plants aren’t capable of putting enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to change the way the world works?

BUT I must also admit that global warming and cooling is a natural process. Our climate is not, and has never been, static. Mankind can and is aggravating the situation, but the idea that if we just scale back to the level of pollution we were putting out in 1990 worldwide we will have the climate of 1990 forever is laughable. The people who believe that just want to believe in a happy ending. Reality doesn’t always have one.

Ten thousand years ago where I’m sitting right now was under two kilometers of ice. Ten thousand years is the blink of an eye in geological terms. Earth has been much warmer and much colder than it is today. Even within recorded history we had a Medieval Warm Period that allowed agriculture in Greenland, and a Little Ice Age that saw Washington’s Army deal with snowfall in Valley Forge that even my grandparents’ home in Muskoka cannot match today.

When we talk about Global Warming as something that can be fixed, we’re deluding ourselves. That’s not to say that it isn’t something that can be dealt with. What we do has an impact throughout the world, and there are things we can do to make sure our planet continues to be able to support us without worldwide famines and dramatic population crashes. Let’s talk about those.

How do you tell people 10,000 years from now to stay the hell away?

(This isn't going to cut it...)

Every day I check out Slate.com, a news e-zine currently owned by the Washington Post that focuses less on the news of the day and more on analysis and critical thinking about what is happening in the world. Today I read a fascinating article By Juliet Lapidos entitled Atomic Priesthoods, Thorn Landscapes, and Munchian Pictograms: How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to future civilizations. The gist of the piece is that the United States is burying all of its atomic waste in New Mexico, and when they seal it up, how will they warn future generations to stay away?

That’s a really good question, and there are a lot of problems with the answers they’ve come up with so far. When you’re talking about that much nuclear waste, your warning message has to be intelligible to people ten thousand years and more from now. Ten thousand years! There is no form of communication in all of human history that has conveyed an understandable message for half that time. We can’t trust English to be understandable to layman even a few hundred years from now (take a look at Shakespeare), let alone a thousand (Chaucer). As for the international symbols for poison or radioactivity, those are only understood through our current society. Ten thousand years from now we might be back to the Stone Age. Ten thousand years from now we could have gone back to the Stone Age and returned to where we are now, with no understanding of who or what we were before. How can we make it clear to anyone at any time that they are standing above a considerable pile of the most deadly, toxic stuff on Earth?